EDITOR'S TABLE.
In the noble Message of President Lincoln, there are two paragraphs which should be committed to memory and constantly recalled by every man:
'Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down into honor or dishonor to the highest generation.
'We say 'we are for the Union!' The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save this Union. The world knows we know how to save it. We—even we here—hold the power and bear the responsibility!'
'We cannot escape history.' And this is true, not only of the Congress and of the Administration, but of all men who at the present day are raised one fraction above the veriest obscurity and completest nothing-ism. You, reader, and series of those whom you daily meet, may fancy that your deeds, speeches, writings, overshadowed as they are by the greater men and events of the day, will be forgotten. It is not so.
The last age was more antiquarian, more given to collecting, searching, and recording, than its predecessor. This present one is, however, a hundredfold more seeking and more chronicling than the last, and this tendency increases every year. As it is, scarce a hero or a traitor, even of the Revolution, is escaping glory or infamy. Will it be less the case with the good and bad men of the Emancipation? There is not one among them who shall escape history.
There is no thieving contractor, no 'helping' official, no shoddy scoundrel, no unrighteously 'commission' gathering leech, who is not quietly noted down here and there, to be duly exposed, some soon—some in after years. We know that extensive researches have been undertaken, to prepare and keep in black and white a record of the rascality of this war, in high places as well as low. They shall not escape history.
There is no cowardly, dishonest, selfish politician—be he who he may—no trimmer and truckler to the times—who will be forgotten. The most important war of all history—the greatest and most clearly outlined struggle between Aristocracy and Republicanism—will not pass away into oblivion. Men will toil away their lives that they may revive some of the salient points of this great fight for freedom. To commemorate the good, they must set forth the opposition of the bad—of those who aided the foe either by approving of endless slavery, by clogging the action of the Administration, or by turning the hardly earned income of Government, wrung from a suffering people, to their own profit. They shall not escape history.
Those who had the ability to aid the great cause of truth in any way, by brain or hand, and yet who did nothing—verily they shall not escape history.